to save myself.
I didn’t yet know why or how it was so, but I knew that in some deep way, she and I will always be in the same boat, rowing against the same tide, toward the same shore.
part ii
beautiful child
In Swahili, the lingua franca of East Africa, any journey is called a safari. Whenever I left Kampala to spend an afternoon with a village family I made a safari. These many small safaris were, however, only the beginning of a much longer safari…a journey in understanding…What has emerged is a new way of viewing the origins and early growth of first love—the attachment of a baby to his mother.
—Mary Ainsworth, Infancy in Uganda
chapter four
One of the first phrases Mary Ainsworth learned when she arrived in Uganda was “Omwana mulungi nnyo nnyo.” In Luganda this means “Oh! What a beautiful child!” Mary was seeking subjects for what would soon become one of the most important studies of mothers and babies ever completed, and though not a mother herself, she knew how to get a woman’s attention.
It was 1954 when she and her husband, Len, finally docked in Kampala. Because all of Mary’s writing about this time is so vivid, and because she took black-and-white pictures of the people she met in the villages surrounding Kampala, I have been able to imagine what these important few months might have been like for her. For instance, throughout her field notes, she manages to tuck mentions of the heat into many descriptions, some of which are ostensibly about other things. In addition to “The climate is tropical but surprisingly moderate,” she writes, “Increasing numbers of the wattle-and-daub houses have roofs of corrugated iron or aluminum…even though they make for a hotter house.” Or “Babies were often clothed, although midday temperatures did not require clothing for warmth…[Others] were usually naked…[but] put into clothes for special occasions, or for warmth when the sun got low in the sky in the late afternoon.”
I can only imagine how the African sun beat down on her like a torch as she and Len stepped down the gangplank upon their arrival. It would have been quite a contrast to the rainy days of Halifax, where the two of them had begun their journey on New Year’s Day. Though this trip would set her entire life and career in motion, she was “not enthusiastic” about it.
But she had an idea. While in Africa, she would try to answer some questions that had been nagging at her—some questions about the nature of love. And she was eager to try out the naturalistic research methods she had recently learned about from her colleague Jimmy Robertson, whom she had met on the job in London, where she was a research associate. John Bowlby and his team were studying maternal separations as he developed a new theory of parental bonds he called “attachment,” and, though she was part of the team, she was skeptical.
Mary had heard that Ganda mothers send their children away when weaning, usually when another child is born. She thought this would be a very tidy way of studying a sudden, possibly traumatic separation that she could then compare with the more ordinary everyday separations that occur in every child’s life, which she hoped to observe in her home visits. She had believed that by comparing these two types of separations, she would be able to better understand Bowlby’s ideas about “attachment.”
Once she arrived, she was able to “scrape together” the funds she needed for the home study of infant-mother behavior she had begun to envision. With the help of someone at the East African Institute of Social Research, she received just enough to support herself and an interpreter, Mrs. Katie Kibuka, a Ganda mother who had studied in the States and who would become Mary’s beloved assistant and translator.
However, she soon learned that the sudden weaning in these Ganda villages never really happened. What she had conceived as the control or baseline to this variable—ordinary separations—became the study itself: everyday life for babies in Uganda.
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MARY FORGED AHEAD. Her first order of business was to find subjects willing to be